Museo dell'Opera del Duomo

Lonely Planet review

Lurking modestly behind the cathedral is the treasure chest of sculptures that once adorned the Duomo, Baptistery and Campanile. As you enter you see several 3rd-century marble fragments from funerary urns and sarcophagi. Some sculptural groups from the Baptistery follow these, and then various statues (ranging from 1335 to the 1380s) that once adorned the doorways of the Duomo.

You then enter the first main hall, devoted to statuary that graced Arnolfo di Cambio's original Gothic façade, which was never completed. Among the pieces, which, after the façade was dismantled in the 16th century, were scattered about churches and gardens across Florence, are some masterpieces, including several by Arnolfo himself. They include representations of Pope Boniface VIII, the Virgin and Child, and Santa Reparata. The long flowing beard of Donatello's St John stands out among the four mighty statues of the Evangelists. Out in the courtyard are displayed eight of the original 10 panels of Ghiberti's masterpiece, the Porta del Paradiso of the Baptistery (what you see at the Baptistery itself are copies). As you head up the stairs you approach the museum's best-known piece, Michelangelo's Pietà, which he intended for his own tomb and which was moved here from the Duomo in 1980. Vasari recorded in his Lives of the Artists that, unsatisfied with the quality of the marble or his own work, Michelangelo broke up the unfinished sculpture, destroying the arm and left leg of the figure of Christ. A student of Michelangelo later restored the arm and completed the figure of Mary Magdalene. Continue upstairs to the next main hall, dominated by the two extraordinary cantorie (choir lofts; one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia) that once adorned the Sagrestie in the Duomo. The panels of Luca della Robbia's cantoria have been removed and placed at eye level for closer inspection. They display children in joyous song and dance, and playing musical instruments, in what is one of the most remarkable pieces of Renaissance sculpture you are likely to see. In the same hall is Donatello's carving of the prophet Habakkuk (taken from the Campanile) and, in an adjoining room, his wooden impression of Mary Magdalene (formerly in the Baptistery) - another masterpiece, tense with the stress and emotion of a woman who has submitted herself to fasting and penitence.